Mitt Romney way out campaigning with Pat Robertson a few weeks ago. Romney seems to be courting the extreme neo-cons as well as the right wing Evangelist group. In a video clip from one of Robertson earlier show the Republican Evangelist gave a man some advice pertaining to his, less than obedient wife. “BEAT HER”!

In an historic move, at their National Convention, the GOP acknowledges that is was and is the party that is responsible for the National Debt, referring to the years of the George Bush, Cheney Administration. Citing the fact that Bush took office when there was no National Debt and there was a surplus of over 10 billion dollars in the government coffers. It took George Bush and Cheney under six years to turn that National Surplus into a multi-trillion dollar deficit!

The GOP feels that just because it wants to restore the same policy of George Bush, the policy that set the wheels in motion, it is no reason not to vote for them. In fact, their guest speaker, “make my day”, Clint Eastwood, who candidly, expressed the American public view of the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, in a dialogue with an empty chair that represented President Obama and the American people. In that dialogue, when the President and the American people told Clint to tell the Republican candidate to “go frack himself”, Mr. Eastwood told the President and the American public, that that was a physical impossibility.

American Public and President Obama tells Clint to tell Mitt to “GO FRACK YOURSELF”

My name is Mae Yates, and in March I celebrated my 90th birthday. I remember a time before Social Security and Medicare. As a child growing up in the Great Depression, I know first-hand how these programs changed the lives of millions of Americans for the better.

But Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to turn Medicare into a voucher system and privatize Social Security, ending these programs as we know them. Romney and Ryan’s plan’s would raise the cost of healthcare for seniors by thousands of dollars every year, and for millions of Florida women like me, the costs would be even higher.

This isn’t only about my generation — I’m worried about the future for my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren.

Since GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney picked Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, seems all we’ve been hearing about is Medicare and its future.

No surprise, of course: Ryan is the author of the GOP budget plan that would dramatically remake how the health care insurance program for seniors is managed and funded. He also calls for big changes to Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor, including elderly Americans who have exhausted their means.

President Obama’s health care overhaul legislation also has significant changes in store for Medicare to secure estimated savings of $716 billion over the next decade. And the legislation calls for a broad expansion of Medicaid.

And Romney? He has sort of embraced Ryan’s plans, calling their proposals "the same, if not identical." He has, however, distanced himself from a part of Ryan’s plan: the part that finds Medicare savings over time equal to those embedded in Obama’s health care law — $716 billion.

Here’s a look at the programs the candidates are selling and their different paths toward reining in the massively expensive and rapidly expanding programs.

MEDICARE

What Is Medicare?

It’s the federal health insurance system for people age 65 or older, certain younger people with disabilities, and people with permanent kidney failure that requires dialysis or a transplant. The system has 47.6 million beneficiaries; in 2009, 9.3 million of those beneficiaries were also eligible for Medicaid.

In 2011, Medicare cost the federal government $551 billion. It has four parts:

Part A: Hospital insurance that covers inpatient hospital care, as well as skilled nursing facility, hospice and home health care.

Part C: Known as Medicare Advantage, it offers, along with coverage under Part A and Part B, additional health plan options provided by private insurance companies, as well as prescription drug coverage under Part D.

Part D: Coverage that helps pay for prescription drug costs, run by Medicare-approved private insurance companies.

Why do we keep hearing the amount $716 billion?

That number has become the focus of debate about whose Medicare plan would do what in terms of saving money and/or cutting services. It comes from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO has estimated that if Obama’s health care law is repealed, as advocated by Ryan and Romney, Medicare spending would increase by $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.

What are the differences between what Ryan and Romney have proposed, and what’s in Obama’s health care law?

Obama: The president’s health care law preserves the current Medicare system of guaranteed benefits, and closes the prescription drug "doughnut hole" coverage gap that affects some senior citizens.

The Obama campaign characterizes the law’s $716 billion as savings largely realized by slowing the program’s growth with a decade of agreed-to reductions in hospital, private insurance and drug company reimbursement rates; and cutting reimbursements to private Medicare Advantage plans. The private-market Advantage plans were intended to manage or lower the cost of insuring senior citizens through market competition; they ultimately cost more on average than the standard Medicare plan.

Obama has asserted that projected savings embedded in the health care law plan would keep Medicare trust fund solvent until 2024; however the legislation uses savings to subsidize health insurance for younger people.

Romney: His campaign’s most recent statement on the issue read like this, as reported by NBC News: "A Romney-Ryan administration will restore the funding to Medicare, ensure that no changes are made to the program for those 55 or older, and implement the reforms that they have proposed to strengthen it for future generations." Romney has, in the past, supported Ryan’s plan.

Ryan: Ryan has proposed a system that would go into effect when people now age 55 and younger hit retirement age.

For those future senior citizens, Ryan has proposed to remake the current system that provides a guarantee of benefits. Under his plan, the government would issue credit vouchers to eligible recipients. They would purchase their own insurance, using the vouchers to defray the cost.

The CBO has estimated that changes proposed in the Ryan plan could push up out-of-pocket insurance costs for an average senior citizen by $6,400; advocates of the plan argue that market forces will drive down insurance costs. Rest of story here…

This is one of many examples where private industry rips off the public. Companies have always taken advantage of the government when they sell their products to the government, the hundred dollar hammer, the five hundred dollar toilet seat and that list goes on. The idea that privatization is the answer is ludicrous, your giving the keys to the hen house to the people who want to sell you the hundred dollar egg. Not only is big oil making record profits but they are subsidized by the government. They use our tax dollars for grabbing up the world reserves of oil through military adventurism; sacrificing our sons and daughters in the process, while Wall Street speculators get more of our money by betting how high the prices will go. The obvious solution is to Nationalize BIG OIL. Of course, the propaganda machine which has been spewing forth the demonizing mantra of such words for decades would have to be overcome, don’t forget who owns these news organizations, the big Corporate Monolith, which includes Big Oil and the other industries associated with them. It is to the vital interest of the American people and the Nation to Nationalize Big Oil Now. Dave

To hear the Republican presidential candidates tell it, President Obama is doing all he can — shy of changing the price signs at your local Mobil station — to raise the cost of gasoline. Last week Mitt Romney told Fox News that Obama “has done everything in his power to make it harder for us to get oil and natural gas in this country, driving up the price of those commodities in the case of gasoline.” Rick Santorum last month warned that gas — now at $3.84 a gallon on average — would hit $5 a gallon under Obama, and that the President “has done everything possible to shut down energy production.” Newt Gingrich — he of the promised $2.50-a-gallon gas — has called on Obama to fire Energy Secretary Steven Chu over comments he made years ago about the need for American gas prices to be higher. “If he doesn’t,” Gingrich said, “then the American people will know the President is still committed to his radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.”

I’m not positive, but I suspect that for Obama — like most Presidents — any ideology, radical or otherwise, takes a backseat come campaign season to the primary objective: getting re-elected. And no President who wants to remain President is going to be happy with gas prices that are scraping $4 a gallon, which is why over the past couple of weeks just about the only thing Obama seems to want to talk about is energy prices — and everything his government is doing to reduce them. Hence the unusual spectacle of seeing a Democratic President — and one who came into office on fire for clean energy — boasting that domestic oil production had risen for three straight years under his Administration. “When gas prices go up, it hurts everybody,” Obama said in a speech last month. “High gas prices are like a tax straight out of your paycheck.”

It’s that same de facto tax that explains why politicians rush to blame each other when gas starts getting expensive. But is Obama really “fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline,” as the Republican Senator John Barrasso said last week?

The short answer is no — and pretty much so is the long answer. First things first: the price of gasoline is overwhelmingly dictated by the global price of crude oil. It’s true that local conditions in individual countries can make a difference. Some East Coast refineries have shut down operations, for example, because they are locked into long-term sales contracts with distributors, making it impossible for them to pass on the higher price they’re paying for oil, and thus cutting into their profit margins. This has further raised the price of gasoline, especially in big cities like Boston and Washington. (If you think you’ve got it bad, it costs $4.14 a gallon to fill up where I work in midtown Manhattan.) That’s a problem that comes from the oil industry and needs to be resolved by the oil industry, not the President, and it’s likely a temporary one anyway as refiners adjust to higher prices and reroute gasoline from the Gulf Coast.

No, gas is expensive because oil is expensive — and oil is expensive for reasons that the U.S. did not cause and can’t unilaterally fix. American oil consumption is actually down from its peak of 20.8 million barrels a day in 2005 to a little under 19 million barrels a day last year. A lot of that is the lingering economic malaise, which depresses business and consumption and therefore driving; unemployed people, in other words, don’t commute. Americans drove just under 8.1 billion miles in 2010, less than the 8.26 billion we drove in 2006.

Obama certainly doesn’t want to take responsibility for the recession, but he may well want to claim some credit for another factor behind declining oil demand: more efficient vehicles. Ten years ago, cars and trucks averaged 24.7 m.p.g. By 2011, that figure rose to 29.6 m.p.g. — and new deals brokered by the Obama Administration with the automakers to raise fuel-efficiency standards to as high as 55 m.p.g. by 2025 could take an even bigger bite out of demand while also giving American drivers more resilience against high gas prices. After all, doubling the fuel efficiency of your vehicle is equivalent to cutting the price of gas in half.

That would be smart to do because it’s quite possible that — barring another major global economic slowdown — oil will remain relatively expensive for the foreseeable future. Right now much of the recent price spike is due to tensions with Iran, a major oil producer. War with Iran is a real possibility, albeit an uncertain one, and if the missiles were to fly, we could easily see a price spike of $50 a barrel or more. So traders and major oil consumers are stockpiling crude now as a hedge against that very situation, which in turn drives the price up now by artificially inflating demand. I can’t see how that’s an incumbent President’s fault. What’s more, it’s the Republicans themselves who are leaning on Obama to take a harder line against Iran, a move that would likely only raise the possibility of war and the attendant crude catastrophe. Rest of story HERE…..

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